Recommendation 16

The Department has ambitions to improve delivery performance through use of ‘agile’ procurement—delivery methods where the requirement and solutions are developed collaboratively in discrete steps with flexibility around requirements, cost and schedule. However, delivery teams found that agile approaches were incompatible with the Department’s emphasis on certainty of output and cost. Two of the Department’s digital programmes teams—New Style of IT (Deployed) and Morpheus—identified a range of shortcomings in their early adoption of agile approaches. These included learning by trial and error, a lack of shared understanding of what will be delivered, customers’ reluctance to accept trade-offs in capability to improve the speed of delivery, suppliers’ lack of experience with the approach, and difficulties when agile programmes need to join up with programmes being delivered traditionally.40 Learning from experience